


release valve

by liminal



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Other, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is love in holding and there is love in letting go" (Elizabeth Berg)</p><p>Pearson Specter is home. And it's only a home if it's still standing. </p><p>So Mike moves on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	release valve

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for the season 3 finale!! the actual actual finale, not the end of the first half.

Mike goes to see Jessica first thing the next morning and doesn’t know if he's feeling nervous or relieved. The pounding headache, he knows, is from trying to drink his way to an answer last night, the slight ache in his muscles from the aftermath with Rachel.

When he steps out of the lift and looks around briefly, dread is the overwhelming emotion. He dreads leaving. He dreads walking out and leaving this place behind, the place that accepted him for what he is, both fraud and man. He dreads Jessica turning round and telling him that he’s copping out, that he's throwing everything the firm and the people in it did for him back in their faces. 

Above all, he doesn't want to be accused of abandoning ship. He’s had too many people leave him to want to hear someone accuse him of walking out on them.

He thinks that maybe he should just go to the associates’ room, finish up that last bit of paperwork (there’s nothing left to do, bar some stapling and hole-punching), leave her to have her morning latte and come back later. You know, let her have a good start to the day. Put her in a nice, easy mood for an afternoon talk.

Leaving it until then would, of course, mean waiting until she’s had her afternoon espresso and she’s done with that 3 o’clocker. 

But there’s plenty of stapling to be done. Loads of hole-punching. Rachel might have some admin that he could do. She’s busy sorting things out with Columbia, she can’t have had time to check that everything’s arranged in binders and cross-referenced. Not that she uses a cross-referencing system, as far as he knows. There’s a first time for everything.

The associates’ room, however, means questions about where he was yesterday, why he didn’t pitch up; did he and Harvey finally get a room? And it means walking in the vicinity of Donna, who smells weakness and fear.

And Rachel, who somehow managed to get up and disentangle herself from the bed sheets when the alarm went off this morning while he groaned and moaned and tried to shut the damned noise out, is making little flicky looks with her eyes in the direction of Jessica’s office. And his grandma didn't raise a coward.

Looks like the morning latte will have to wait.

So Mike turns right and imagines all the world-ending scenarios that could take place on the long walk to her office.

Dread, though, turns to relief on his walk. This is home. This building full of trembling associates and thousand dollar suits and over-caffeinated people with actual Harvard law degrees is home. Leaving’s going to be a bitch, Mike’s absolutely sure of that. Sidwell seems like a good guy and he can’t deny that banking’s gonna be a challenge, and he’s not a guy to back down from one of those, but he’ll miss the terrible biscuit selection in the associates’ kitchen and Louis’ terrifying Harvard quizzes and the views from the conference room windows. 

But at the end of the day, this little piece of home is going to be a hell of a lot safer if he comes in as a client and makes Harvey call him 'sir'. And it’s only a home if it’s still standing.

Mike knocks on the glass door and enters when Jessica beckons. 

-

“So I guess we won’t be insisting on a non-compete,” Jessica smiles, and Mike smiles in response.

“No. I’ll only insist on the nice conference room when I come in for meetings,” he says, feeling much happier about the ways of the world than he did when he sat down in front of the major-domo twenty minutes ago.

They’ve had their ups and downs, but Mike knows that Jessica’s sad. The firm is family, after all, and you don’t watch your son leave home with dry eyes. Hell, he’s sad, too, but it’s for the best.

A slight quirk of Jessica’s eyebrow lets him know he said that last bit out loud.

“Yes, I think so,” she says. “I should have fired you when I first found out, risked the exposure. But you’ve done a lot of good here, Mike. For the firm. For yourself. For Harvey. Scottie told me he’d changed too much from the man he was. I think a lot of that was down to you.”

At this point Mike is drowning in shallow water. This wasn’t exactly the route he’d thought this conversation would go down when he walked in. He’d expected a little more contract, a little less sentiment. With Jessica, though, the two are often synonymous, or at least mutually beneficial.

“Hm, if things had been different…” she muses, and Mike’s openly grinning.

“You mean, if I’d actually gone to Harvard and not hacked my way to a law degree and Bar membership,” he asks, and Jessica chuckles.

“No, I meant if Louis or I been doing the associate interviews that day, instead of Harvey.”

“Would you have hired me?”

“I wouldn’t have swallowed your bullshit for a second.”

-

Word travels fast round Pearson Specter and it’s not long before Mike’s inundated with emails and claps on the back and the odd leading question about the morals of investment banking. Someone - probably Donna - arranges a leaving do at an extortionately priced wine bar during his last week, and since Rachel promises him that neither he nor Harvey pulled out a credit card, he can only assume the firm paid for that, too.

What Mike owes Pearson Specter can’t quite be put into words or numbers and the cheque he gets for his bonus, which he’s certain Harvey had something to do with because, shit, no one gets paid that much as an associate after causing all the trouble he has, doesn’t lessen the burden.

-

His last day is a bizarre affair. Donna can’t decide whether to keep quiet or babble away constantly. Louis gives him a motivational speech, a reminder to check his blood pressure every week and a bone-crushing hug that Mike never expected in a million years. There’s one last case that Harvey pushes him to finish before seven - not that Mike really needed any extra motivation. This is the case that turns Batman into Superman (he’s eased up on the Aquaman references since his bonus), his last chance to prove that he made a better Robin than Chris O’Donnell did.

Though that’s not exactly fair, comparing Harvey to George Clooney. Clooney has nicer eyes, as he explains to Harvey later when the two of them are three sheets to the wind.

But first there’s dinner at an Italian restaurant where table reservations are usually made two months in advance, and once the initial awkwardness of essentially being on a dinner date has passed, it’s like the good times. Before dodgy jury deals and the US Attorney got involved and that whole Hessington fiasco. They order thick steaks and rich red wine, and Harvey scoffs at Mike’s weakness for chocolate torte.

Then they hit the bars that Mike would never have thought Harvey would step foot in. But he does and from then on it’s shots of everything going until Mike wakes up the next afternoon on one of Harvey’s leather sofas, with sour breath and a pounding head and Harvey comatose on the sofa opposite him.

-

Six months later, Mike exits a corporate car parked outside the Pearson Specter offices. Sidwell joins him from the other side and they walk in with matching strides, the same way their minds work in tandem back at the office only a few blocks away. Donna smiles at him like she’d smile at a neighbour from her childhood who she’s just bumped into, but what’s not in the curve of her lips is in her eyes and the wink she gives him when he walks into Conference Room B. Inside, Louis tells him he’s clearly been keeping his cholesterol under control. Harvey tells him it’s about goddamn time he started wearing tailored suits and wider ties, though Mike doesn't tell him that he dressed for this meeting in particular. 

And business commences as normal.


End file.
